Hallway ideas

Hallway ideas from the world's most stylish homes, your essential guide to choosing hallway furniture and hall decoration. Too often, halls are relegated to thoroughfares, where coats and shoes are dumped and not enough thought is put into their decoration. The right paint colour or wallpaper can brighten and lift the darkest or smallest of spaces. Include elegant storage to cut down on clutter, enliven your floor with a vibrant rug or runner or use the walls to display an art collection. If your hallway receives a daily bashing from your kids, why not consider hardwearing tiles or wall panels? We've found the most enthralling halls and corridors from our archive for design ideas to inspire you…

The painting above the chimneypiece in the hallway of Cameron Kimber's Australian house is a seventeenth-century piece by Sir Godfrey Kneller, while the plant holder is actually a stack of oriental lacquered tables. Brick flooring, white walls, and a simple marble chimneypiece form a calming backdrop to these antiques.

The entrance to designer Ben Pentreath's flat is through a white door onto the stairway, the walls of which are covered in framed artworks. The print based on Radio 4's Shipping Forecast (centre) is from Flowers and Fleurons, a small letterpress workshop in Brighton that produces hand-printed limited edition prints. This particular one is the 'Finisterre' edition in subtle greys, printed for Ben Pentreath.

The pendant light is 'Beat Wide Black' from Tom Dixon, while the red chair on the right is a Prince of Wales Investiture Chair from 1969 designed by the Earl of Snowdon.

This bright blue corridor benefits from a series of large skylights, which were introduced to welcome natural light into this 1880s London flat. The owner decided to raise the height of the doors and instructed that the entrance to the corridor to be raised, converting what had been a dark, rather pinched entrance to the bedrooms into a wonderfully light and airy space filled with books.

Somewhat quixotically, the owner asked specialist painter Mathew Bray to copy the colour of a friend's faded T-shirt when painting the hallway, which made an unexpectedly perfect accompaniment to the saffron-coloured living room.

'Something new and colourful is what I thought I'd do,' says interior designer Gytha Nuttall about the decoration of her south London home. 'But as the project developed, slowly I returned to all the muddy colours I love best.'

The owners of this west London town house enlisted interior decorater Henri Fitzwilliam-Lay to create a modern family home with a chic mix of colour and texture. The mix of pattern and texture can be found throughout the house complimented by the starburst mirrors and geometric floor patterns in the hallway. Henri dictated the use of gloss paint in the corridors. 'Halls are always the first thing to go - they can look ratty in months,' she says. 'People avoid using gloss because they feel that it shows the lumps and bumps, but it's fine - particularly if you're hanging art'.

A tiled staircase can look spectacular, but is hard to achieve due to the weight of the tiles and the necessity for a perfectly flat surface. The staircase at the house of design writer Maryam Montague, just outside Marrakesh, looks tiled, but the risers are in fact painted with designs that Maryam created in collaboration with stencil artist Melanie Royals. Melanie's stencils are available to buy from her website royaldesignstudio.com.